Even before Obama finished laying out his plan, college leaders and congressional Republicans said they were skeptical about his proposal to base federal grants and loans on college “value.” He outlined the plan in two speeches in Buffalo, N.Y., and Syracuse, N.Y., during the first stops of a two-day bus tour in New York and Pennsylvania.

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But Obama pointed out that he, too, was skeptical of colleges’ and Congress’s capacity for reform. “Some of these reforms will require action from Congress, which is always difficult,” he told high school students in Syracuse on Thursday night. “Some of these changes, though, I can make on my own.”

The ambitious marquee financial aid proposal — tying federal dollars to the “value” colleges offer students — requires Congress to act. But the Education Department could rate colleges based on access, affordability and outcomes, and make those ratings public, using the data to encourage colleges to change. It could offer flexibility in using federal financial aid to speed college completion. And it could push borrowers to consolidate loans and enroll in more generous repayment programs.

“Obviously, they need to be cautious about something that might prompt a reaction from Congress to shut down their authority,” said Robert Shireman, a former deputy undersecretary of Education. He led an expansive higher education agenda during Obama’s first two years in office. “But they have pretty broad authority.”

Acting on that authority has plenty of precedent. Throughout the Obama administration, the Education Department has pursued a far-reaching agenda with or without Congress. It’s waived key provisions of No Child Left Behind for states that met certain criteria, written controversial new rules governing for-profit colleges, and pushed to collect and publicize more education data.

All those efforts could serve as templates — and cautionary tales — as the department puts the president’s ideas in practice.

Creating a system for grading colleges is an obvious first step, said David Bergeron, a longtime career official with the Education Department. He is now the vice president for postsecondary education at the Center for American Progress.

The Education Department already collects data on the price students pay for college, the average amount they borrow, low-income students’ enrollment and other factors Obama said a rating system would take into account. And White House officials said they hope publishing that data, which they’ll start doing in 2015, could be enough to nudge colleges to change.

There would be hurdles: The federal graduation rate measures only first-time, full-time students, leaving out the burgeoning population of older students attending part-time or college dropouts returning to try again. Collecting and publishing information on graduates’ earnings is equally fraught. Federal law prohibits creating a national system to track students’ outcomes from college and into the workforce, known as a unit record system.

But there are also workarounds, Bergeron said. The Education Department wrote new regulations in 2011 meant to ensure that graduates of for-profit colleges and vocational programs were able to get jobs and repay their student loans. Enforcing those regulations meant getting data from the Social Security Administration and matching the information with records for student loan borrowers. A similar process could be used to track earnings for all graduates with student loans — and since about two-thirds of students borrow, that would capture a substantial proportion of four-year college students. The department could also request earnings data from individual colleges.

The approach could be legally dicey. A federal judge ruled in March that collecting Social Security data to enforce the regulations on for-profit colleges violated the federal ban on a unit record system, and ratings of public and nonprofit colleges could invite a similar challenge. The ratings are also likely to get pushback from colleges, who worry that they could do more harm than good.

“If you start ranking institutions on the basis of flawed data, or if you pick elements that don’t really have meaning or value for students and families, you could be steering them away from institutions that might be very good choices for them,” said Becky Timmons, assistant vice president for government relations at the American Council on Education.

The Education Department could also give colleges the flexibility to test new programs by waiving financial aid rules. The department already experiments with new approaches to financial aid. One current experiment allows students who already have a bachelor’s degree to get another Pell Grant — not typically allowed — so they can enroll in a vocational program.

Colleges volunteer to participate in the experiments, and the Education Department has the authority to waive legal requirements. A similar approach could be used, at least on a small scale, to try out additional innovative programs.

Obama singled out a program at Southern New Hampshire University that allows students to earn degrees at their own pace by completing readings and taking tests to show how much they’ve learned. Other experiments could let students use financial aid to pay for tests that let them earn credit for skills picked up outside the classroom. Or they could expand federal financial aid to include high school students earning college credit through dual enrollment programs.

Even the only accountability idea proposed Thursday focused on students — making students show academic progress before getting more grant money — could begin as an experiment.

“They think they have enough authority to allow colleges to extend beyond what is clearly authorized in statute, and it’s not the kind of thing where the college is going to complain,” said Shireman, now the executive director of California Competes.

The ideas would work better if Congress gets on board and allocates money to make them happen, Bergeron said, but even if not, he said, the administration has plans that don’t need to wait.

“The president has been calling for institutions of higher education to take action on this since he took office, and the higher education community as a group has not risen to that challenge he laid down,” Bergeron said. “So now the administration needs to move forward and do the work that needs to be done.”